I burned some time last night by going to Guitar Center for about 20 minutes and very briefly tried a Spider IV while there. I didn't have much time to mess around on it, but as has happened before, I found myself kind of overwhelmed by the number of settings.

After thinking about it some more, I came up with a question: why don't these modelling amps ever just target one famous tube-y sound and do their best to nail it with DSP? I can think of a few amps right off the bat that would probably be good targets (AC30, Blues Jr., etc.), and while they might be limited with a 1 x 12", they could tone down the interface and just nail that one amp.

The issue I inevitably have with modellers is that tweaking is required to really find a sweet spot, and if you don't know what you're doing, the amps might sound like ***. Seems to me a company like Line 6 could just copy a simplistic interface of a tube amp, get the EQ and gain calibrated, and have an amp that sounded and behaved like the thing it's modelling.

Any thoughts on why they don't do this? Such an amp undoubtedly would not be as popular with 13-year-olds, but I imagine it might turn some heads in the tube-amp/pedal-board crowd.

Side note: I know Tech 21 is doing something like this with the character series, but they're still trying to cut a somewhat wide swath (e.g. Mark through Dual Rectifier with the California), and it's just a pedal, not an entire amp.